Video game consoles, such as the Xbox® game console marketed by the Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash., have been widely proliferated and are found in many households. Often, a single home may have multiple game consoles dispersed throughout, such that single individuals may separately play their own games of choice or, alternately, they may elect to compete with other individuals by connecting the dispersed game consoles via a home network.
Traditionally, game consoles have been low cost devices embodying specialized hardware for rendering audio, and two or three dimensional graphics. In the past, game consoles have focused on entertainment scenarios in which all rich media content was found either in built-in storage, such as ROM/flash, or hard drives, or it was introduced on portable storage media such as DVDs or CDs. One exception to this is the Media Center Extender for the Xbox® game console marketed by the Microsoft Corporation, which facilitates the streaming of live television or video over an IP network to a game console from a personal computer. Though quite useful for Standard Definition (SD) content, the Media Center Extender does not support streaming High Definition (HD) content to a game console.
Thus, there exists a need to enable a game console to receive real-time streaming HD content.